


meant & mean

by bog gremlin (tomatocages)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Assassination Attempt(s), Crying, Dom/sub Undertones, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Intimacy, M/M, Massage, Non-Sexual Intimacy, One Shot, Plans For The Future, Post-Canon, Postwar Politics, Protective Shiro (Voltron), Quintessence (Voltron), Quintessence-Sensitive Keith (Voltron), no Season 08, resolved emotional tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:42:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28272564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomatocages/pseuds/bog%20gremlin
Summary: When Shiro learns that Keith’s injured in an assassination attempt, he drops everything to go to Daibazaal and stand guard while Keith recovers.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 209





	meant & mean

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sinspiration](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinspiration/gifts), [an_aphorism](https://archiveofourown.org/users/an_aphorism/gifts).



> Requested by Aphor for our great friend ils -- all the greatest, kindest tidings of the season to you!

& when he knelt, he rose steady as the perennials

Keep their yearly promise: all blossom & green.  
My hand in his fist, my fist in his hand, my betrothed,  
Engaged, affianced, intended—yes—  
My intended, for all I could not say

But meant & mean.

—from _[In Defense of a Long Engagement](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/154224/in-defense-of-a-long-engagement),_ Mairead Small Staid

* * *

Like anything that mattered nowadays, Shiro was alerted by a video call. He’d been about to make a call of his own, already in the process of keying in the code, when Krolia’s message came through _._

“Shiro,” she said, abrupt in a way that made him go on high alert. “Is this line secure?”

It was a fair question, and not only because Krolia was still learning how not to be a spy. Most lines at the Garrison weren’t secure, not in a way that meant Shiro could have any expectation of privacy. Without answering, he set his prosthetic against the ship’s curving wall and requested Atlas block all monitoring on the line. It wasn’t a step he normally took, because Shiro knew that the Garrison was more likely to leave him alone if they knew the gist of what he was getting up to; but Krolia would only call for one reason, and it was the same reason he’d been about to call her. 

Keith had been due on Earth the day before to join the Paladins for an unofficial reunion, but he hadn’t shown. The silence was notable; the absence was cause for alarm. Now that Keith was, officially, an aid worker, he was less likely to disappear from view.

The communicator appropriately shrouded, Shiro gave Krolia his full attention. “Right,” he said. “Where’s Keith?”

“Keith is alive,” Krolia assured him, and hearing _alive_ as opposed to _fine_ or _uninjured_ was not reassuring. Shiro had been _alive_ himself, loads of times; it was usually an indicator that things had been pretty bad. The only prerequisite for being _alive_ was a heartbeat.

“What happened?”

She shrugged, a gesture she must have picked up from her son. “There was an assassination attempt on Daibazaal. I assumed you’d like to know why Keith hasn’t been answering your calls.”

Shiro felt himself disassociating: from his job, his obligations, the offer to help Hunk lay a hāngi for a planned cookout. “Send me the coordinates,” he told her, and Atlas buzzed to life around him, unrolling an unobstructed hallway to the bridge. “I’m on my way.”

* * *

Keith was asleep when Shiro arrived at his bedside. Shiro paused for a moment to take in the shape of him: Keith had acquired more Glara features over the years — his ears pointed at the tips, the sclera of his eyes yellow, tiny fangs extended past his lip — but the stripes on his face were new, as was the overall lavender hue that mottled his skin. Shiro wondered when those had manifested. He always made a point to comment on Keith’s changing features, to admire them and reiterate how well the changes suited him. 

The wolf ’ported into the room, Krolia grasping its scruff. 

“Good dog,” she said, and the wolf _borked_ at her before it settled at the foot of Keith’s bed. The topmost blanket was covered in a layer of blue fur.

“What happened?” Shiro demanded. 

“Quintessence poisoning,” Krolia answered. “He’s sensitive to it anyway, but a rogue druid hit him with a blast when the rebels cut power to the audience hall. I apprehended the culprit.” She smiled, showing all of her fangs. It was not a nice smile. “He won’t bother my son again.”

Shiro felt bloodthirsty and couldn't bring himself to be ashamed of it. “Good,” he said, and sat. “I put in for extended leave. I’m here as long as Keith needs me.” 

“Thank you.” Krolia made an aborted movement, like she was on the verge of setting her hand against Shiro’s shoulder, the way he always did with Keith; but she didn’t complete the gesture, and Shiro was relieved he didn’t have to bear it. “The wolf will bring you whatever you need. No one else knows Keith is here.”

Once she and the wolf left, Shiro set his hand on the sharp line of Keith’s shin beneath the blankets. 

“Hey, Keith,” Shiro said, settling in. “I’m here.” 

* * *

A wound glowed sick and bright under Keith’s hospital gown. Shiro, sitting to the side of the bed, had been staring at it for hours, watching the way it pulsed and spread out against Keith’s side; it was intimately familiar, in a way that burned and echoed under Shiro’s skin, reminding him of fires and promises lead Voltron. He thought he might understand some of Keith’s distress now, years later, with a horrible clarity. 

Krolia stopped in occasionally and offered updates about the rebel group she was meticulously pursuing. Keith’s mother looked bloodthirsty and stoic all in the same breath as she handed over supplies: medicine. Food, if Keith woke and wanted it. Fresh sheets. Shiro had mastered the art of changing the linens without disturbing Keith’s already-troubled rest, and the doll-like laxity of Keith’s body in the bed scraped at his nerves.

Shiro was the only one allowed in the hospital room. It was practically a bunker. He didn’t blame Krolia and the Blades for hiding Keith away like this, even if they had caught his would-be assassin. Shiro hoped they'd torn him apart. 

No one offered to take Shiro’s place, which was a relief; Shiro no longer possessed the tact he’d need to refuse them, and was uninterested in pretending at it. Every moment was spent in vigil, over Keith. The silences were terrifying; Shiro usually spoke with Keith at least every other day, and the lack of response felt something akin to being robbed. He wanted Keith to wake, desperately. 

Keith had started reaching out for comfort in his sleep, rousing just enough to hold Shiro’s hand when it was offered. There was nowhere else Shiro needed to be. 

* * *

Keith woke soon after that first awful day, groggy with pain. He didn’t cry, exactly, but he twitched beneath the blankets and let out a horrible sound, a gasp mixed with a low moan. Shiro refused to let anyone see Keith like that, not even Krolia and the wolf. He positioned his considerable bulk next to Keith on the bed, like a very large shelter made of flesh and bone, and fed Keith ice chips — or some Blade-sanctioned nutritional supplement that looked like ice chips — while he crooned nonsense that, somehow, wasn’t nonsense at all. 

“Hey, sweetheart,” Shiro soothed, stroking the stripe running down the unscarred side of Keith’s face. The mark made Keith’s cheekbones even more devastating than they’d been previously. “You’re safe now.”

“Shiro,” Keith wept, blessedly unsurprised to see him, and pushed his face into Shiro’s hand. “I don’t feel good.”

He wouldn’t settle until, in a fit of desperate frustration — Keith was going to aggravate the wound if he didn’t settle — Shiro wrapped his prosthetic hand around Keith’s throat. And that was what it took. It looked monstrous, but Keith stopped crying once Shiro’s massive fingers were pressed against his neck, encompassing it like armor. 

The weight of his palm against Keith’s throat was a strange and brutal comfort. Shiro realized he had been angry, all the time Keith lay unconscious. He’d been furious that Keith was unresponsive. Now that anger transmogrified into tenderness, into relief. Shiro was grateful for it; Keith was alive for Shiro to be angry at. 

“Bet you don’t feel good,” Shiro commiserated. He didn’t dare move his hand, but he tapped his thumb against Keith’s pulsepoint in reassurance, the haptic feedback buzzing against his synthetic skin, giving him a haphazard reading of Keith’s vital signs; a shitty monitor, but Shiro was inclined to cut himself some slack. “If it’s anything like how I felt after getting poisoned by Haggar, I don’t envy you.”

“You won’t leave me, will you?” Keith’s eyes were over-bright and he wouldn't stop _clinging_ to Shiro’s wrist, to the front of Shiro’s shirt, pulling Shiro’s palm tight against his neck _._ “Not again, Shiro. You can’t do that to me again.” As if _Keith_ hadn’t nearly died while Shiro was halfway across the galaxy.

“Listen to me,” Shiro told him. He tightened his grip just enough to stop Keith from trembling, and felt the way Keith swallowed against the pressure. “I’m not leaving you. I’m with you every step of the way.”

“How long?”

“As long as this takes,” Shiro promised. “As long as you’ll have me. I’m right here, sweetheart. I won’t let go.”

* * *

Eventually the fever broke and Keith came back to himself, by degrees, enough for Shiro to remember that Keith was a terrible patient: now that he was alert, his more stubborn qualities were making an appearance. As much as Shiro was willing to take joy in Keith’s gradual recovery, he was losing patience. And focus.

“I can walk!”

“Not well,” Shiro pointed out. Keith was wearing, as he had been since Shiro’s arrival, a backless hospital gown that facilitated easy access to the enormous, sickening bruise extending from beneath his left pec all the way down his flank. It was a practical garment, given the givens, and Shiro was trying not to appreciate it too much. The seriousness of the wound — healing slowly, druid magic so strong a taboo that few doctors knew how to treat it — helped keep his mind on more vital matters than the revelation that Keith had acquired more stripes down his back and across his hips. 

“I’m not saying you can’t pace the room like an unhinged hero from one of Lance’s telenovelas,” Shiro snapped, using his size to loom menacingly over Keith; it had little effect. “You’d be a star if you went that route. But it’s not the best use of your energy.”

“Ugh!” Keith slouched back into the nest of bedding, though he didn't quite relax. “I know you’re right,” he conceded. “But I need to do something.”

“I don’t think either of us know how to take a vacation,” Shiro snarked, because Keith always responded well when Shiro referred to the two of them as a team, “but this is a hard limit. If you don’t relax, I’ll _make_ you.”

“How are you gonna do that?” Keith’s eyebrows were as mobile as ever. He arched one pointedly in Shiro’s direction, and the minor insubordination got under Shiro’s skin. 

“That’s it, you little punk,” Shiro said, relief transmuting itself into playfulness. He tackled Keith, gentle and still badly misjudging Keith’s frailty: they tumbled down onto the bedding and Shiro, now draped along the whole tender line of Keith’s body, froze and took stock. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Keith affirmed, though he was breathing hard. He wriggled until Shiro rose up onto his knees and sat back, creating enough space for Keith to raise himself up on his elbows. The gown was caught up under his armpits, and the bruise glowed with vague malevolence. 

“I could rub your back,” Shiro blurted out the offer. To his surprise, Keith accepted with a huff.

“Worth a shot.” He failed to sit up, flopped back down so he lay between Shiro’s knees, and was finally still. “It — it doesn’t hurt as much, when you touch me.”

It took some adjusting. Keith wormed so he lay belly-down, exposing the beloved curve of his spine. The pain must have been pervasive; his shoulders had taken up residence somewhere in the vicinity of his ears. Shiro hovered over him, ready to help but refusing to insult Keith by offering aid before it was requested. 

Keith’s gown rucked up with the movement, exposing his back and the rounded curve of his ass. Shiro tried to avert his gaze, but a glimpse was all it took: he was good at visualizing, and he’d died too many times to consider himself a gentleman. 

The matter at hand: the quintessence mark was painful and itched where Keith’s flesh was trying to repair itself. 

Shiro turned up the temperature on his prosthetic and rested it against Keith’s shoulders while he fussed one-handed with the dispenser of one of the frictionless emollients Krolia had sent. By the time he had a palmful of the stuff, Keith had made some headway with order to _relax:_ he wasn’t boneless, but he no longer looked like he was trying to maintain Blade posture. The slump was a gift, one that meant Keith was trusting him.

“Okay,” Shiro said, not bothering to camouflage his satisfaction at having a task, at the way Keith submitted to him. “I’m going to rub your back and you’re going to tell me if I’m hurting you. Got it?”

“Yessir,” Keith’s voice was muffled by the pillow, but he sounded, reluctantly, relieved to have orders. 

Shiro took his time rubbing the oil into Keith’s skin. He used both hands interchangeably, careful to keep his flesh hand in play when he coaxed tension out of Keith’s neck; he knew the synth-skin of the prosthetic wouldn’t catch strands of Keith’s hair in its joints, but he still hadn’t shaken off the strange, reassuring feedback of Keith clinging to that hand wrapped around his throat. Shiro wanted a little more time with that feeling in the privacy of his own head. 

When he worked at Keith’s shoulder — Keith carried his tension in a series of knots, and this one was deep beneath the scar from his Trials — Shiro could feel Keith quivering beneath his hands. 

“Okay?”

“It’s fine,” Keith gasped. Shiro could see the edge of his face, half hidden in the pillow. Keith’s eyes were squeezed shut and he was crying like he hadn’t when he’d been out of his mind with fever; the salt-tracks made his purple skin look like it was accumulating a cross-hatching of additional stripes. “Keep going.”

Touch was complicated for Shiro. It was obnoxious before Kerberos, when he saw an endless rotation of specialists, and it was terrible after the arena, when Shiro couldn’t interpret anything in the spirit with which it was meant. In the years since the end of the war, Shiro had taken to getting massages once a month. The regular sessions grounded him, but that first postwar massage had nearly brought Shiro to tears: the relief from pain was enormous, and the feeling of another person's touch was monumental. He wondered if that overwhelming relief was anything like what Keith was experiencing now. 

If his hands on Keith’s back gave even an iota of that comfort, then Shiro was prepared to retire and sign up for massage school in the morning. Keith was so good; he asked Shiro for so little. All Shiro wanted was to tend to him.

“When I was first diagnosed,” he told Keith, kneading at a dense spot in his trapezius, “I used to get sports massages every week. I hated them. It wasn’t until after the war that I started getting massages just because my shoulder hurt at the end of the day.” He laughed at himself, because it was such a silly stumbling block. He laughed because it was a distraction from how large his hand looked against the pulsing bruise on Keith’s latissimus dorsi. “I know, I’m getting old.”

“You’re not old,” Keith mumbled back. He had to lift his head out of the pillow in order to make himself heard, and that wouldn’t do. Shiro upped the amount of heat going to his prosthetic palm and stroked down the length of Keith’s spine until he coaxed Keith back into a state of relaxation.

“I don’t think any of us know a damn thing about getting old,” Shiro allowed, admiring the way Keith softened at his touch. “Not me, not you, not anyone who fought in that war. There wasn’t room for it. There wasn’t time for anything except fighting, and training, and maybe getting some sleep.”

“Sleep,” Keith muttered in the tones of a man who had recently emerged from a coma and was exhausted by the ordeal. He didn't lift his head this time and Shiro had to lean close to hear him. “I feel like almost dying was the best sleep I’ve had in ages.”

“You’re as bad as me,” Shiro commiserated. “When I said I wanted you to take my place, this wasn’t what I was getting at.” He probed the edges of the quintessence mark, chasing the pigmentation away from an intersecting stripe with the pressure of his fingers. Quintessence wounds were a mystery even now, years after the war. Shiro had an abundance of the stuff running through his body; from Haggar or Allura, he’d never been sure. 

Keith squeaked and twitched — it was too trusting a movement to be called a flinch — but the horrible glow of the bruise receded the more pressure Shiro applied. If the room hadn’t been so well-lit, Shiro might have been tempted to say his hands emitted a light of their own against Keith’s skin.

“Hurts,” Keith said. It was a status update. He wasn’t complaining. 

“I know,” Shiro told him. “I’m sorry — I know — ” and he kept pressing down on the mark. The energy had a texture all its own, and Shiro fantasized that he could wring it out of every muscle fiber and fascia, even if he didn’t know what to _do_ with the quintessence once it was harvested. 

Beneath his hands, Keith started to sweat. It was possible he was crying again, still; Shiro refused to check, because he couldn’t afford to lose his concentration. 

“Easy,” he crooned. “I know it hurts. I’m sorry.”

“Keep going,” Keith demanded. If Shiro thought he sounded muffled before, it was a miracle he could understand Keith now: he was biting the edge of the pillow and his fangs were ripping into it, sharp with distress. 

The massage disintegrated into field medicine. Pressing against the wound was akin to setting a broken limb: Shiro knew, in some remote part of his brain, that he had to hurt Keith in order to carry him through the worst of it. 

And with a terrible _snap_ — Shiro worried for a moment that he’d cracked one of Keith’s ribs, _why_ was the cure as bad as the disease? — the wound flared bright, sick purple before fading away completely, leaving Keith’s bare skin unmarred but for its fetching stripes. He was still purple; it looked normal, now.

Shiro’s fingers had gone numb from the flare, even his prosthetic ones. The flash of light had blurred his vision; while he waited for sight to return, he concentrated on the sound of Keith breathing wetly in and wetly out. 

“Did you get it?” Keith asked. He sounded exactly like himself. He didn’t sound like Shiro had hurt him worse than he’d been hurt before.

Shiro collapsed down on top of Keith, letting his bigger body go limp over the length of Keith’s back. This close, he could tell Keith was still shaking. So was Shiro; if he pressed close enough, maybe his weight could mold them both back to their usual unrattled shapes, maybe their hearts could prompt each other into slowing down. He wished he could increase his mass, something, anything: pinning Keith down was a vast relief.

“Think so,” he said belatedly.

Just then, the wolf teleported into the room, crackling blue and barking ferociously; the sound cut off abruptly and transitioned to whining. Without further ado, the creature bounded onto the bed and wormed its triangular head under the arm Shiro had curled protectively around Keith’s shoulders. It licked at the shy line of Keith’s neck, clearing away any traces of tears, then nosed down until it came to the place where the quintessence poisoning had pulsed against Keith’s side. 

“Hey, baby,” Keith said. “I’m getting better.” His voice was so tender when he talked to the wolf: Shiro would gladly put up with the beast shoving its furry tail in his face for the rest of his unnatural life if it meant hearing Keith speak like that, unreservedly fond.

* * *

Even though the bruising had dissipated when Shiro had coaxed the malevolent buildup of the druid’s quintessence out of him, Keith’s body was a long way from being healed. But with the mark gone, so too had the fight gone out of Keith; he seemed content to lie in bed and allow Shiro to attend to him.

“Sorry,” Keith wheezed. “Making it hard on you.” He had just swallowed a mouthful of tonic wrong, and the bitter concoction had caught in his throat until he could cough wetly into the towel Shiro threw at him. Shiro was relieved he was sitting to the side; the wolf got misted with the spray and left in a huffy shower of blue light. The sudden privacy was like being left without a chaperone. 

“It’s not,” Shiro said. “Not for me, anyway; I’m on vacation.” He was keenly aware of how Keith had spoken after discovering Shiro’s illness: without any change whatsoever. He was determined to return the courtesy, though Keith was injured, not sick, and Shiro had healed him. 

“My mother killed them, right?” Keith asked. “The druid who did this to me. They’re dead now.”

“Yes,” Shiro confirmed. He couldn’t help how fiercely glad he was that Krolia had defended Keith until Shiro came to take up his position. Shiro’s place was at Keith’s side: he was cognizant of that, proud to sit next to Keith even if only on a hospital bed, their thighs pressed warmly against each other. Shiro had never said as much, not to Keith, but he didn’t think he needed to, after everything. He always wanted Keith near. Keith’s missions were a constant torture.

He didn’t say, _I would have killed anyone who tried to hurt you,_ but the sentiment was clear. Shiro had a history of being bloodthirsty. In this situation, it made him a fortress, a defender of Keith’s vulnerabilities. 

“Do you think that means his bloods on my hands or on hers?” Keith mused, bypassing Shiro’s devotion in order to wallow in his own guilt, persistent since the war’s end. “She killed him. She’s killed a lot of people. But she wouldn’t have had to do it if it weren’t for me.”

“Listen to me,” Shiro moved without thinking. He straddled Keith and grasped his shoulders, not shaking him but on the verge of doing so. “Your mother’s a soldier, and no matter who was leading the Blades, someone was going to try and take them down.”

“I thought I was done fighting,” Keith said. He sounded — sullen, maybe, or angry. “I thought the war was over.”

Shiro perched heavily atop Keith's thighs — it was a tactical decision, made so Shiro had time to choose his words carefully. Keith settled under his weight. 

“You and me, I don’t think we’ll ever stop,” he said after a moment. “We were shaped by the war. You run from it by handing out care packages and brokering treaties, I fill out trade agreements and lead training exercises that are supposed to be for morale but are really so Earth can make a show of force the next time a conflict arises. I don’t think this is what we fought for — the paperwork is just as violent as some of the battles.”

“Every time I go out in the black, I think about not coming home,” Keith said. He pressed his head back into the pillow so he could look up at Shiro without straining his neck, eyes wide and bright with the confession. “I keep trying to show the universe that I’m a Galra _and_ I’m civilized, but it’s hard to convince _myself._ I have claws, Shiro. I’ve got a juvenile record.” 

“Those records are shit and you know it,” Shiro told him. “Hell, _I_ know it; forget the rest and listen to _me._ It’s just a story.”

“I thought we fixed it,” Keith bit out, and here came the tears again. “I thought once we made it through, and the Blades got — got _rebranded,_ everything would be fine. I’m not fighting anymore. I was reporting on how much bottled water we were able to give to a fucking orphanage when that druid got me.”

“Did you have your blade on you?”

“Of course I did, I’m not an idiot,” Keith snapped, angry, perhaps, that he still had so many defense — that he still needed to use them. 

He let himself fall forward, planting his hands on either side of Keith’s face so he could lower himself all the way down. “Good ,” Shiro said, because he couldn’t bring himself to say anything else. He rubbed at the tears with his thumbs, waylaying them. “Whatever you did to survive, Keith, that was good.” 

* * *

That conversation altered the chemistry between them and they both knew it. Hell, even the wolf knew it; it stopped spending so much time lying across the foot of the bed. Shiro appreciated the privacy. 

Keith talked to him during those long afternoons. Well. Shiro assumed it was during the afternoon; there weren’t any windows in the little room, just video-projected nature-scapes on the wall at the foot of the bed. Keith said it was probably because one of the Blade doctors had raided a biomedical database on Earth to try and figure out what convalescing humans needed, just in case the Galran methods didn’t do the trick. 

“Well,” Shiro said, “that explains why my hospital room always had scenes of Mount Fuji on the wall. Could have done with one of the prettier ones, though; views of Mount Fuji in the fog are kind of pointless.” 

That was another change that had crept in: their comfortable banter had returned. The end of the war had imposed a terrible intensity on his time spent with Keith, and Shiro appreciated how that desperation was beginning to drain away. Before the druid had attached, every exchange had felt like a situation report, delivered so Shiro could reassure Keith of his own wellbeing and Keith could pretend at the same. The air hadn’t grown any less intimate, in part due to the massages he insisted on giving Keith. The physical closeness allowed for dialogue that, finally, wasn’t about work or war: it was softer. The terrible alertness that had reinforced Shiro’s backbone since Krolia’s call began to subside. 

“What’s next?” He asked. Keith had graduated to sitting upright while they talked, and Shiro crammed himself next to him on the bed so they could work on a crossword puzzle in tandem. It was one of the harder ones in the book Krolia had given them: they’d been stuck on seventeen-across for at least five minutes. 

“We haven’t figured out this clue,” Keith scolded. Shiro jumped around when he was solving this sort of thing, approaching it from every possible angle and returning to old clues once he’d solved their surrounding squares. Keith was more straightforward, which was to say, stubborn. He kept trying to solve the puzzle with brute force. Shiro didn’t feel like pointing out that neither one of them had enough pop culture knowledge for that to be a viable approach; the book had been published before Keith was even born, and bore the handwriting of both his parents. Shiro was impressed that it was made from actual paper.

“Not the puzzle,” Shiro said. “I’m talking about the rest of the world.” He gestured vaguely towards the spot the wolf always landed when it teleported into the room. There wasn’t a visible door, and Shiro hadn’t separated himself from Keith’s bedside long enough to make a thorough examination of the room’s seams and edges. 

Keith set down the pencil — that was the benefit of having spent so long in space; no one tried to shame him into solving a crossword in pen, because no one bothered with pens in low-gravity environments — and shoved himself as close to Shiro’s side as he could get. At this stage in his recovery he had a fair amount of weight to gain back. The parts of him pressed against Shiro were bony and deliciously uncomfortable. Every dig of a knee or elbow was a sharp reminder that Keith was alive. If things had gone differently, he might not have been. 

“I don’t know,” he sighed. “I should probably get back to work at some point — there’s always more to do — but… ”

“It’s okay if you don’t want to, Keith,” Shiro told him. “That’s not giving up. Hell, if anyone deserves an early retirement, it’s you.”

“It’s not that,” Keith said. “Not exactly. I don’t feel like I’m _done_ yet. I just don’t know if this is what I’m supposed to be doing.” 

Shiro retrieved the pencil from Keith’s fingers and closed the crossword book. The front cover flopped sadly, its glue nearly dissolved from the binding. “Well,” he said. “You could always stay with me while you figure it out.”

“Hoped you’d say that,” Keith leaned heavily into Shiro’s tiny sliver of the bed, a clear invitation for Shiro to start rubbing Keith’s back again. “Think you’ll stay on Earth?”

Shiro thought, for the first time in a while, of the paperwork he’d abandoned in favor of Keith’s bedside. He thought of the endless meetings, the training drills, and realized he was thinking of it as a life that was no longer his own. It was as good as having sent in his resignation letter. 

“I’ll go wherever you are,” Shiro said. “I’ll be honest — I don’t know how you managed to make it through the war with me dying every time you turned your back. I can’t say I enjoyed being on the opposite side. I plan to keep you in my sight from now on.”

“As long as we’re in agreement,” Keith said. He dropped his chin so Shiro could get a better angle at one of the knots in his neck. Shiro rubbed hard for a few moments, teasing the fascia until they released. 

“Shiro?”

“Yes, Keith?”

“Thank you. For coming.”

Shiro stopped rubbing Keith’s neck in favor of pulling him all the way into Shiro’s lap, back to Shiro’s chest. It had the added bonus of allowing him to get his entire ass onto the bed, as opposed to the one cheek he’d been perched on since the crossword book had made an appearance. 

“I wasn’t about to give up on you, remember?” 

“You’ll have to keep reminding me,” Keith said. “We can both work on avoiding near-death circumstances.”

“Okay,” Shiro said. “I’ll be good for you and you’ll be good for me. Sound about right?”

Keith made a choked noise, and trembled, and lifted Shiro’s big prosthetic hand to wrap protectively around his throat. “I can be good,” he promised. It felt even larger than a promise: Keith had said, moments before, that he didn’t know what he needed to be doing. Shiro was happy to tell him, however he ended up giving those orders: Shiro liked the feeling of that control, its honor and weight, and wanted to bottle it up so he could drink it whenever he felt plagued by doubt. Keith would be good, for Shiro. 

Shiro savored the feel of Keith’s pulse leaping under his fingers, the way he relaxed against the breath of Shiro’s chest. “Well, if you’re going to be good, I’ll make you a deal: I’ll run away with you. We’ll go somewhere beyond the known stars. And we’re going to be just fine.” 

It was second nature to keep his free hand on Keith’s side, over where the wound had been. Shiro stroked it, even though the quintessence had long since bled out from it, and he let himself enjoy the opposing textures of the open-backed gown and Keith’s bare skin; he dared to slip his hand forward, beneath the fabric, to lay his palm over Keith’s vulnerable belly. They were on the verge of something. 

Shiro had felt this during the war, the first time he’d called out the Black Lion’s wings, and again when he’d transformed Atlas. It was a sensation that indicated something was moving; but for once he felt entirely like staying still. Keith was warm and safe under Shiro’s hands, and he had agreed to stay there. 

There was very little in Shiro’s life that could be controlled. Keith’s body, newly healed, the naked trust he offered up as he leaned into Shiro’s grip — was enough to fill the gap. 


End file.
